If Washington's rebuilding efforts go well, that might, in principle, stabilize or restore confidence in Washington; but [Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred] Smith, for one, has no worries on that score. "Louisiana has the ability to corrupt any program, and it certainly has the capacity to take millions of dollars and turn it to waste," he says. Air-dropping money will work no better in Louisiana than it does in developing countries, he predicts.

Tales of waste, abuse, and ineptitude have already surfaced, and the media are digging hard. (On September 18, the lead story in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel excoriated "a national disaster-response system that for years has been fraught with waste and fraud.") Reports that the government will erect quasi-permanent trailer cities and subsidize resettlement in flood-prone areas suggest that billions may be spent counterproductively.

It is too early to call Katrina a watershed (pardon the expression) in Americans' attitude toward government. But it is not too early to imagine that Katrina may be to this decade what the Oklahoma City bombing was to the last: a shock that both reveals and reinforces a sea change (again, pardon the expression) in public opinion.

The antiwar movement has found itself ill served by endowing absolute moral authority on a political radical [Cindy Sheehan] who demanded that American troops leave not just Iraq but "occupied New Orleans." Who blames Israel for her son's death. Who complained that the news media went "100 percent rita" -- "a little wind and a little rain" -- rather than covering other things in the world, meaning her.

Most tellingly, Sheehan demands withdrawal not just from Iraq but also from Afghanistan, a war that is not only just by every possible measure but also remarkably successful. The mainstream opposition view of Iraq is that, while deposing the murderous Saddam Hussein was a moral and even worthy cause, the enterprise was misconceived and/or bungled, too ambitious and unwinnable, and therefore not worth expending more American lives. That is not Sheehan's view. Like the hard left in the Vietnam War, she declares the mission itself corrupt and evil: The good guys are the "freedom fighters" -- the very ones who, besides killing thousands of Iraqi innocents, killed her son, too.

You don't build a mass movement on that. Nor on antiwar rallies like the one last weekend in Washington, organized and run by a front group for the Workers World Party. The WWP is descended from Cold War Stalinists who found other communists insufficiently rigorous for refusing to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Thus a rally ostensibly against war is run by a group that supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and a litany of the very worst mass murderers of our time, including Slobodan Milosevic, Hussein and Kim Jong Il. You don't seize the moral high ground in America with fellow travelers such as these.

I hope some day somebody writes all this down, because the whole story is unbelievable. Miller never writes a story about Plamegate, but insists she must keep her sources secret, even though the name of her primary source, Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, has long since been a matter of public record -- and has publicly released her from her pledge of anonymity. She decides to go to jail to protect the principle of source anonymity, and is only weeks away from being sprung (because the grand jury she was refusing to talk to will go out of business in Ocrober) before she abandons her stand on principle and decides to talk. And all this in relation to a matter that may well not have been a crime to begin with. Weird wacko crazy bananas.

In 1777 the Congress of the United States — forced to flee in the face of advancing British forces — moved to York, PA. In 1791 Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" premiered in Vienna, Austria. In 1846 dentist William Morton used ether as an anesthetic for the first time on a patient in his Boston office. In 1938 British, French, German and Italian leaders decided to appease Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. In 1946 an international military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, found 22 top Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes. In 1949 the Berlin Airlift came to an end. In 1954 the first atomic-powered vessel, the submarine Nautilus, was commissioned by the Navy. In 1962 black student James Meredith succeeded on his fourth try in registering for classes at the University of Mississippi. In 1993 an estimated 10,000 people were killed when an earthquake measuring a magnitude of 6.4 struck southern India.

Thursday, September 29. 2005

After nearly three months in jail, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released Thursday after agreeing to testify in the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA officer, two people familiar with the case said.

Miller left the federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., after reaching an agreement with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Legal sources said she would appear before a grand jury investigation the case Friday morning. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings.

I’m a businessman and a free market libertarian, but I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies. From an investor’s perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that’s not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate.

My argument should not be mistaken for a hostility to profit.
...

The ideas I’m articulating result in a more robust business model than the profit-maximization model that it competes against, because they encourage and tap into more powerful motivations than self-interest alone. These ideas will triumph over time, not by persuading intellectuals and economists through argument but by winning the competitive test of the marketplace. Someday businesses like Whole Foods, which adhere to a stakeholder model of deeper business purpose, will dominate the economic landscape. Wait and see.

... at least on the evidence presented so far, the indictment of Mr. DeLay by a state prosecutor in Texas gives us pause. The charge concerns the activities of Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), a political action committee created by Mr. DeLay and his aides to orchestrate the GOP's takeover of the Texas legislature in 2002. The issue is whether Mr. DeLay and his political aides illegally used the group to evade the state's ban on corporate contributions to candidates. The indictment alleges that TRMPAC took $155,000 in corporate contributions and then sent a check for $190,000 to the national Republican Party's "soft money" arm. The national committee then wrote $190,000 in checks from its noncorporate accounts to seven Texas candidates. Perhaps most damning, TRMPAC dictated the precise amount and recipients of those donations.

This was an obvious end run around the corporate contribution rule. The more difficult question is whether it was an illegal end run -- or, to be more precise, one so blatantly illegal that it amounts to a criminal felony rather than a civil violation. For Mr. DeLay to be convicted, prosecutors will have to show not only that he took part in the dodge but also that he knew it amounted to a violation of state law -- rather than the kind of clever money-trade that election lawyers engineer all the time.

John Glover Roberts Jr. became the 17th chief justice of the United States Thursday, overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate to lead the Supreme Court through turbulent social issues for generations to come.

The Senate voted 78-22 to confirm Roberts — a 50-year-old U.S. Appeals judge from the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md. — as the successor to the late William H. Rehnquist, who died earlier this month. All of the Senate's majority Republicans, and about half of the Democrats, voted for Roberts.

... flu is easy to underestimate. The virus spreads so easily via tiny droplets that 30 million to 60 million Americans catch it each year. Some 36,000 die, mostly the elderly. It mutates so fast that no one ever becomes fully immune, and a new vaccine has to be made each year.

That's ordinary flu. But the disease that is taking lives in Southeast Asia is no ordinary flu. Its primary victims have been chickens, more than a hundred million of them, killed either by the virus or in often futile control efforts. It's not unusual for chickens to get flu; in fact, avian-flu viruses far outnumber human ones. But Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis has studied flu viruses for 40 years and has never seen the likes of [this] one.

"This virus right from scratch is probably the worst influenza virus, in terms of being highly pathogenic, that I've ever seen or worked with," Webster says. Not only is it frighteningly lethal to chickens, which can die within hours of exposure, swollen and hemorrhaging, but it kills mammals from lab mice to tigers with similar efficiency. Here and there people have come down with it too, catching it from infected poultry. Half the known cases have died.

In those deaths many public health experts hear the distant rumblings of a catastrophe. So far this virus—classified as H5N1 for two proteins that stud its surface like spikes on a mace—isn't good at passing from birds to people, let alone from one person to the next. "It can make that first step across, but then it doesn't spread easily from human to human," says Webster. "Thank God. Or else we'd be in big trouble."

In 1789 the US War Department established a regular army with a strength of several hundred men. In 1829 London's reorganized police force, which became known as Scotland Yard, went on duty. In 1918 Allied forces scored a decisive breakthrough of the Hindenburg Line during World War I. In 1943 General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice aboard the British ship Nelson off Malta. In 1978 Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1979 Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit Ireland as he arrived for a three-day tour. In 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after unwittingly taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. In 1988 the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, FL, marking America's return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster. In 2000 the privately built SpaceShipOne rocket plane hurtled past the edge of earth's atmosphere, completing the first stage of a quest to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.